﻿microcosm﻿

(Circa 2001)

In a game written by science teachers to get kids interested in anatomy, “Microcosm will take you to the edge of your imagination!” But only if your imagination includes a bad remake of the movie Innerspace. Allow me to describe the setting. The year is… something. On a distant planet, two major corporations are at war. Meanwhile, the only people who live on that planet are criminals, hobos, and criminal hobos. And they all have the plague. You are a member of Cybertech, the number one mining corporation on this planet. But some jerk from Axiom, the number two corporation, has injected your company’s president with microscopic machines to take over his brain. It is your job to get microscopicised and shoved up his ass or something in order to stop the evil force within.

Fact: Screenshots from this game aren't very interesting. Bonus Fact: Neither is this game.

Ok, that all makes sense. What I don’t understand is this: if they want me to destroy something in the guy’s brain, why the hell did they inject me into his effing finger? Couldn’t they have just injected me into his head? Maybe they could have just killed the president and blamed it on Axiom. Come to think of it, I don’t know why I spend so much time trying to figure out why these games are so terrible. I should probably concentrate more on why the hell I keep playing them. It’s like being addicted to swallowing used hypodermic needles. And writing about it.

Pictured: Breakfast.

The intro isn’t bad… until people start talking. Then it looks like some kind of crappy foreign film dubbed with the voice actors from Hook. All both of them. And there are only a few things in the entire intro that decided to have color. At least the video quality in this game is still 500 times better than in Hook. The first part of the intro is a bunch of people talking into radios, flying helicopters, or falling over for no damn reason. The saddest part of all is that none of it even has anything to do with this game or its alleged “plot”. It’s like they needed to make the intro longer so they used the intro from a completely different game that they never finished. The next part is where the real intro for this game begins- the crappy, foreign film intro. This scene starts with two guys exchanging unintelligent dialog about how they’re going to inject this guy with deadly robots. One’s a scientist, one’s a thug. Both are homos. And the audio was stolen from two gay junior high kids with the help of a hidden locker room microphone, which, in addition to being horrifying, might incidentally explain the bad dubbing. Here’s some of it now:

GAY1:“Are we ready? … Not having any second thoughts about this? Not getting a little nervous?”GAY2:“Of course not, it was my idea in the first place. …”GAY1:“Well, if that’s the case, you won’t mind me bringing a couple friends in. Just to make sure things run smoothly. …”GAY2:“No one else was supposed to be here!”

Now that I think about it, one of them actually sounds like an adult. I find this highly disturbing. Well, with that out of the way, I think I’m ready to enter this guy’s body. Uh… in the game, I mean.

Pictured: The best reason why no one should EVER make Matrix fan-fiction.

The first thing I learned about human anatomy from this game is that blood vessels are empty tubes, devoid of anything except robots and green stingrays. One of the leading myths about blood vessels is that they are there to transport blood “cells” to every part of the body. These “blood cells” are an untested theory, and any brilliant scientists or “teachers” who have told you otherwise are dirty liars who can go to hell. The next thing I learned is the game only lets you pause during the three seconds before the level. During the level, however, you conveniently can’t pause, making it easy to do things such as hating this game and not going to the bathroom.

After that, there isn’t too much worth commenting on, except maybe where the manual lies and says you’ll get to go to the lungs. Instead, you go to the femur. I guess it’s easy to confuse the two, since they’re both in your body and the creators of this game are effing idiots. I realize that all I did in science class was get kicked out, but even I know the difference between the organ that makes you breathe and the organ that’s an effing BONE. The manual also provides an alternate intro that doesn’t coincide with the other. It’s like the game and the manual were written by two separate teams of trained chimpanzees that weren’t allowed to communicate with each other. The rest of the manual is filled with false information about fictional planets and vehicles from a game no one in they’re right mind would even play. There isn’t anything special about the ending, either. You just get unshrunk and some newspaper writes an article about you. Personally, I think a better ending would be my Sega CD exploding. No, wait… A big “CONGRATULATIONS” on the screen, then my Sega CD exploding. I really don’t know why the company made such a big deal about rescuing this guy, especially since he’s gonna die anyway, because of all the damn atomic sparks I shot into his brain.

RATING (OUT OF 10)

GRAPHICS: 5 The graphics look like the inside of someone’s anus. But unfortunately, I think that’s how they’re supposed to look, so I just gave it the same rating I always give when I’m confused.SOUND: 7 The music is amazingly less than awful. I think the game staff is trying to trick people into thinking their game isn’t terrible. Don’t let their propaganda fool you. They just want you to fail biology.PLAY CONTROL: 3 I don’t like the play control on normal shooters. As it turns out, abnormal shooters are even worse. Now I can’t hit the enemies even if I am aiming right. Actually, I’m probably just blaming the game for my own mental illnesses. Not being able to pause is worth mentioning, though.FUN: 4 Once again, I had to review an effing shooter. I don’t like shooters, damn it!

OVERALL RATING: 4

This, like almost every Sega CD game I’ve played so far, is the type of game I wouldn’t even think of looking at if it weren’t for the sake of my reviews. No matter how painful it gets, I just can’t stop. This one is particularly bad, though, since all it has to offer is pretending to be educational so dumb kids will feel smart. But speaking as a dumb kid, their plan doesn’t work and we don’t like educational things anyway.

It wasn’t very smart of the science teachers to make this game. It teaches kids untrue “facts” about anatomy, and it makes kids hate science. But really, I was the only one who said it was made by science teachers in the first place, so I shouldn’t blame them for this game. Not directly, anyway. I should blame them for doing their job so poorly that there are people in the world uneducated enough to make games like this. All I’m saying is the idiot that created this game shouldn’t have been allowed to pass his high school biology class. He should still be the guy that spits in my burger for a living.